The tech punditry world has developed an almost religious devotion to the idea that great companies are built on pure virtue, treating any commercial pragmatism as a fall from grace. This seductive but naive mythology fundamentally misunderstands how successful businesses truly operate.

Consider the fantasy that Apple’s success came from ignoring money entirely and focusing solely on making great products. This narrative is so entrenched that it’s treated as historical fact, but it misrepresents what made Apple special. The company didn’t succeed by being indifferent to profit, but by understanding that sustainable profit comes from creating products people genuinely want to use instead of extracting maximum value from captive customers.

That’s a subtle but crucial distinction. A company that truly ignored financial considerations would quickly find itself unable to invest in R&D, attract top talent, or scale manufacturing to meet demand. Apple’s genius wasn’t in rejecting commerce but in mastering it. It recognized early on that short-term extraction undermines long-term value.

The current wave of criticism directed at Apple says more about the critics’ expectations than about the company’s actual strategy. Some observers seem determined to find signs of moral decay in every business decision. It’s as if Apple had betrayed sacred vows, rather than behaving as a corporation trying to navigate complex tradeoffs in a competitive market.

Consider the hand-wringing over Apple’s various policies. Yes, the company prioritizes its own interests, charges premium prices, and maintains tight control over its platforms. These aren’t recent corruptions of some pristine original vision. They’re consistent features of Apple’s approach that have existed throughout its history, including during the periods that critics now hold up as golden ages of virtue.

The real question isn’t whether Apple has changed, but whether the expectations placed on it have become unrealistic. There’s a strain of tech criticism that seems to want Apple to be simultaneously more open and more curated, more affordable and more premium, more developer-friendly and more user-focused. These aren’t necessarily contradictory goals, but they exist in tension with each other, and real companies must make hard choices about which values to prioritize.

There’s also an obsession with leadership changes as a cure-all for complex institutional challenges. The idea that swapping out executives will instantly reshape a company’s culture and priorities ignores the reality that those executives are operating within systems of incentives, constraints, and stakeholder expectations that extend far beyond any individual leader’s personal philosophy.

This isn’t to say that leadership doesn’t matter. Of course it does. But the fantasy that new faces will bring wholesale transformation often reflects a misunderstanding of how institutional change actually happens. Meaningful improvement comes from shifting focus, changing processes, and gradually building new capabilities. It’s messy, incremental work that doesn’t lend itself to dramatic narratives about redemption and renewal.

Another problematic aspect of virtue-focused criticism is how it tends to treat business success itself as somehow suspect. There’s an implicit assumption that if a company is making a lot of money, it must be doing something wrong. This perspective fundamentally misunderstands the role that successful companies play in driving innovation and economic growth.

Apple’s financial success isn’t incidental to its ability to create great products. It’s essential to it. The company’s massive research and development budget, its ability to take risks on unproven technologies, its capacity to negotiate favorable terms with suppliers, all of these capabilities flow directly from its commercial success. A financially struggling Apple might make critics feel better about its moral purity, but it would be far less capable of pushing the boundaries of what consumer technology can accomplish.

The ongoing developer relationship issues that generate so much commentary provide a useful case study in how these dynamics actually work. Developers have legitimate grievances with Apple’s policies and processes. The correct solution is to find sustainable approaches that balance developer needs with user security, platform integrity, and yes, Apple’s own business interests.

The notion that Apple should open its platforms and remove restrictions reflects idealistic thinking that ignores practical tradeoffs. More open platforms can indeed be more developer-friendly, but they also tend to be less secure, less consistent, and less user-friendly. These aren’t abstract theoretical concerns. They’re practical realities that affect millions of people.

None of this is to dismiss the genuine frustrations that developers experience when dealing with Apple. App Review can be maddeningly inconsistent, with identical apps receiving different treatment for reasons that seem arbitrary. Communication from Apple often feels like no human actually read the developer’s question. These are real problems that real people face when trying to build businesses, and they deserve to be taken seriously. Apple could absolutely do better at providing clear guidelines and more helpful feedback. The company’s tendency to announce major platform changes with little advance notice creates unnecessary stress. Developers are often forced to scramble to adapt.

What’s particularly striking about contemporary Apple criticism is how it often seems to pine for a simpler time that never actually existed. The romanticized image of early Apple was a company that made plenty of controversial decisions, charged premium prices, and maintained tight control over its products. The difference isn’t that the company has changed its fundamental approach. The difference is that it’s now successful enough to attract the kind of scrutiny that comes with being one of the biggest technology companies in the world.

The reality is that Apple today makes products that hundreds of millions of people choose to buy, often at premium prices, in competitive markets where they have plenty of alternatives. That’s not a sign of corporate manipulation or market failure. That’s a sign of a company that’s successfully creating value for its customers.

This doesn’t mean Apple is perfect or above criticism. Every company can improve, and external pressure can play a valuable role in encouraging that improvement. But the most useful criticism focuses on specific, actionable problems, rather than grand narratives about institutional decay and the need for radical changes.

The tech industry would benefit from more observers who understand the real constraints and tradeoffs that companies face, rather than critics who treat every business decision as a moral failing. The goal isn’t to build companies that mirror critics’ ideologies, but to create companies that continue to innovate and serve their customers well over the long term. Sometimes those objectives align with critical expectations. Sometimes they don’t. And that’s perfectly fine.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​